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smcleish 's review for:
A Life To Waste
by Andrew Lennon
This very short novel manages to pack a lot of ideas into its 162 pages. The central character, Dave, is portrayed from the start as a thoroughly unpleasant person. He basically sits around all day, forcing his mother to keep him and taking drugs. This existence is caused by a traumatic event as a teenager, when his promising athletic career was ended. (It's all very well for an individual to consider his existence to be "a life to waste", but this is making life very difficult for the others around Dave too.) Then there's an attack on his next door neighbour, before his mother disappears and the story seems about to turn to a horror version of [b:A Christmas Carol|5326|A Christmas Carol|Charles Dickens|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1165518693s/5326.jpg|3097440] for a while, before it becomes a more standard man-standing-alone-against-nameless-horror story.
A Life to Waste is perhaps best experienced in small chunks, so its division into very short, two or three page, chapters is sensible. Dave's character is extremely passive and repellent repellent at the start of the story, so a little goes a long way. His change into hero is not particularly believable, but at least offers a measure of redemption for him. That may not be the most interesting path he could take (as opposed, say, to Max Pyat's glorification in his unpleasantness in [a:Michael Moorcock|16939|Michael Moorcock|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1222901251p2/16939.jpg]'s quartet of books told by him), but it is at least less unpleasant.
Three factors may have contributed to me not liking A Live to Waste all that much. The character of Dave is one; while it may be interesting to read about unpleasant people, I don't choose to spend time with them in real life if I can help it, and I have to work hard to make myself read about them at length when they are the viewpoint character in a story. Being less passive, or having a more carefully written transformation into hero, might have helped here. This combined with the short chapters to make me read in short bursts, which made A Life to Waste seem bitty and unconvincing, something which might have been less the case if I had read it through in a single sitting. I often like reading novels where there are many ideas, finding it stimulating to do so, but here, probably because of the first two factors to a large extent, it seemed more like Lennon was flailing around trying to find anything which would make the tale more gripping.
As is often the case with books submitted to me for review, A Life to Waste is not the type of novel I would choose to read for myself; this means, of course, that others might well enjoy it more than I did. It is well written enough to suggest that a longer, less dislikable, story from Andrew Lennon would be well worth reading, but having worked through A Life to Waste, I would probably not spend the time in doing so but would be looking for something more congenial to me.
A Life to Waste is perhaps best experienced in small chunks, so its division into very short, two or three page, chapters is sensible. Dave's character is extremely passive and repellent repellent at the start of the story, so a little goes a long way. His change into hero is not particularly believable, but at least offers a measure of redemption for him. That may not be the most interesting path he could take (as opposed, say, to Max Pyat's glorification in his unpleasantness in [a:Michael Moorcock|16939|Michael Moorcock|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1222901251p2/16939.jpg]'s quartet of books told by him), but it is at least less unpleasant.
Three factors may have contributed to me not liking A Live to Waste all that much. The character of Dave is one; while it may be interesting to read about unpleasant people, I don't choose to spend time with them in real life if I can help it, and I have to work hard to make myself read about them at length when they are the viewpoint character in a story. Being less passive, or having a more carefully written transformation into hero, might have helped here. This combined with the short chapters to make me read in short bursts, which made A Life to Waste seem bitty and unconvincing, something which might have been less the case if I had read it through in a single sitting. I often like reading novels where there are many ideas, finding it stimulating to do so, but here, probably because of the first two factors to a large extent, it seemed more like Lennon was flailing around trying to find anything which would make the tale more gripping.
As is often the case with books submitted to me for review, A Life to Waste is not the type of novel I would choose to read for myself; this means, of course, that others might well enjoy it more than I did. It is well written enough to suggest that a longer, less dislikable, story from Andrew Lennon would be well worth reading, but having worked through A Life to Waste, I would probably not spend the time in doing so but would be looking for something more congenial to me.